Customer Spotlight: How to Take a Holistic Approach to Enablement

Sales enablement is an ongoing effort to provide reps with the resources, content, and training they need to do their jobs and increase sales. But it’s crucial to understand that enablement isn’t just training.

Enablement teams are also responsible for vital company-wide initiatives, including onboarding, change management, team and stakeholder coordination, and more.

In this month’s customer spotlight, Lissa Songpitak, Head of Revenue Enablement at Enable, shares that organizations must approach enablement holistically and programmatically–instead of treating it simply as a training initiative–to drive long-term success.

Read on to discover her enablement philosophy and strategies for establishing and maintaining a focused, effective team. 

Establish an enablement philosophy

Aligning priorities, values, and goals is essential for any team, not just enablement. You must define your core values and framework to streamline your approach and maximize effectiveness.

“At Enable, we care about readiness, effectiveness, and productivity,” Lissa says. “So if we bring on a new tool, for instance, we have to understand the gaps in the process that might prevent people from adopting the tool. So we take an overall look at our business process with how tools are leveraged in conjunction with KPIs and metrics we want to impact. Based on that, we design the overall end-to-end program.”

Establishing this framework and communicating it widely and loudly to the entire organization helps team members stay focused and understand how their efforts impact business goals.

Read more: How to Build Your Enablement Roadmap

Define program success

Success doesn’t look the same for everyone. And your definition of success may differ from that of another organization and even by department or team. Therefore, defining success and ensuring team members understand this is essential. 

At Enable, success metrics are designated by program managers. Because program managers have their own swim lanes and responsibilities, they have their own KPIs and metrics.

For example, Enable uses onboarding to get Account Executives (AEs) certified and up to speed to run meetings from end to end. 

“When we first started, the goal of the program was for everyone to get certified and out into the field to start building pipeline in 10 days,” Lissa says. “We’ve been able to bring that down to 9 business days. The faster they’re in the field, the faster they can generate pipeline.”

Lissa recommends defining not only success criteria but also failure criteria as well. This way, you can quickly determine if you’re not headed in the right direction and pivot before spending more resources. 

Read more: Data-Driven Sales Enablement: Track, Measure, Improve

Build in upskilling and reskilling

Upskilling is vital to your organization’s success because it helps to close skills gaps and enables employees to stay agile. It’s also crucial for employee retention, as 94 percent of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their development.

When upskilling and reskilling are built into your program, you enable your reps to be field-ready at all times. 

“Upskilling and reskilling are captured as a standard part of our ongoing enablement,” Lissa says. “We do enablement sessions monthly, whether with the entire revenue team or specific roles or teams.”

Lissa shares that part of Enable’s upskilling efforts is ensuring team members understand what’s coming, what’s being released, and what’s on the roadmap and equipping them with the assets and resources they need to sell.  

Read more: How to Upskill Employees: An L&D Manager’s Guide

Deliver the right content to maximize learner engagement

Reps need the right sales enablement content at the right stage in the buyer’s journey to give them the information they need to nurture leads and convert sales.

But training content isn’t only crucial for sellers; it’s essential during onboarding and ongoing training. Lissa shares how her team uses WorkRamp to streamline training content and ensure employees have access to the materials they need when they need them. 

Lissa recommends asking: How can you ensure the LMS is servicing the content at the right time within the right context and making it easy for learners to find it when they need it?

“For an LMS to be successful and see adoption, the people using it need to find immediate value in it. So find a way to get the team in the system, get familiar with it, and use it to find content.”

 

 –Lissa Songpitak

Help your team maximize effectiveness by defining your philosophy and success metrics, prioritizing ongoing training, and providing the content your team needs when they need it.  

Learn more about how Enable uses WorkRamp to scale onboarding and certifications to boost field effectiveness.